Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542, issued a series of sermons advising the men in his congregation to avoid sexual sin. He emphasised the need to avoid even the circumstances for such misdeeds, which meant (among other things) avoiding interactions within private spaces with women who were sexually available—in other words, vulnerable—due to their inferior social status. Caesarius thus worried about the close proximity of female domestic slaves, who were under their owner’s authority, and women captured in war, who might be allotted to a warrior as a sexual reward. Captives were not straightforwardly slaves, in the sense that they were usually freeborn people with a family or a community who might be in a position to pay a ransom and free them. But those captives who went unredeemed, or for whom no ransom was sought, might expect to see their status reduced to that of a slave, a common enough outcome that allowed Caesarius to speak easily of the ‘slave or captive’ in this passage. The allotment of captive women to warriors as slaves, and as a sexual reward, remained a common outcome—and indeed a common motivation—for participation in war. In one of his sermons, he imagined an example of the latter scenario, and he used the themes of masculine strength to frame sexual sin as an unmanly failure to have the strength to control oneself. In that process, however, he portrayed the female captive as an active source of spiritual corruption, a danger to be avoided. It seems unlikely that Caesarius’s argument persuaded many young men to refrain from sexually exploiting those captive women allotted to them as war spoils, but his framing of the victim as the source responsible for arousing male sexual urges may well have further marginalised women who were already in the most vulnerable possible position.

Translation and commentary by E. T. Dailey, undertaken as part of the research conducted for DoSSE Project, which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101001429). Translation from the Latin. Caesarii Arelatensis opera, pars I: Sermones, ed. by German Morin, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 103 (Turnhout: Brepols, repr. 1953), sermon 43.8. This translation CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 43.8

How is it that sometimes the bravest man goes out to battle, and by chance kills no fewer than ten enemies, and from this particular victory takes a girl from the spoils, and when he joins with her through adultery his soul is killed by the sword of sin? See how great an evil it is that someone might be crueller to himself, by killing his soul through lust, than by shredding the bodies of his enemies through worldly victory. Truly it must be bewailed and lamented that the one who, as I have said, defeated ten enemies, is overcome by a single woman, and the one who killed so many enemies in the body, is slain by one girl in his heart. Truly it is an exceedingly grave evil that a brave man, who is not defeated by iron, is overcome by his sexual desire, and that soft and seductive things might destroy him whom hard things do not defeat, and that he who despises to be a captive or a slave to humans deserves to be a slave to sin.

Discussion Questions

  • In what ways did the perspective of Caesarius and the warrior whom he criticised actually align to create the conditions of sexual vulnerability and exploitation for women captured in war?
  • What to the blind spots in Caesarius’s critique reveal about the society in which he (and these war captives) lived?
  • How is the metaphorical use of slavery, in the sense of ‘a slave to sin’, interacting with the actual enslavement of people?

Related Primary Sources

Related Secondary Sources

  • Bailey, Lisa, ‘“These Are Not Men”: Sex and Drink in the Sermons of Caesarius of Arles’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 15.1 (2007): 23–43.
  • Gaca, Kathy L., ‘Ancient Warfare beyond the Battle: Populace Ravaging and Heterosexual Rape’, in Civilians and Warfare in World History, ed. by Nicola Foote and Nadya Williams (London: Routledge, 2017), 42–66.
  • Vihervalli, Ulriika, ‘Wartime Rape in Late Antiquity: Consecrated Virgins and Victim Bias in the Fifth-Century West’, Early Medieval Europe, 30.1 (2022): 3–19.
  • Wood, Elisabeth Jean, ‘Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?’, Politics & Society, 37.1 (2009): 131–162.

Themes

Captives, Religion, Sexual Slavery, Women